No To Business Votes, Yes To Democracy!

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POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

It’s time to grab back the city from corporate interests and rebuild the Fortune Playhouse – not literally but in our imaginations; so that Finsbury, Cripplegate and the rest of EC1 becomes a place of play and creativity, somewhere that nourishes our community!

Candlewick

Leaders at the City of London Corporation have been criticised after the prestigious Mansion House was used to honour the “humanitarian” work of the wife of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has thrown thousands of his own people in jail. Emine Erdoğan was given an award by the Global Donors Forum at the prestigious venue “in recognition of her humanitarian service”. Her husband’s regime in Turkey is seen by many as brutal and dictatorial, increasingly run by a clique of his close family and friends.

This week’s alderman election in the Ward of Cheap highlights what’s wrong with the City of London election system, since for a grand total of 12 residents and 467 voters there is an alderman and 3 common councillors (4 councillors in total). That’s a councillor for roughly every 117 voters, and if we take away those with undemocratic business votes who also get to vote for someone else wherever they live, one councillor for every 3 residential voters! The minuscule voter numbers are absurd and the entire system inevitably leads to unfairness. Consider, for example, the need to get 5 people entitled to vote within the ward to nominate anyone who wishes to stand as a candidate in council elections. Anyone with views at odds with the finance industry is unlikely to find 5 people on the register of voters in business vote dominated wards who would nominate them.

The fact that a Lib-Dem such as Patrick Streeter and Labour Party candidates function as anti-establishment figures within the City of London says a lot about the cosy and anti-democratic political set-up in this rotten borough. Another indication of what’s wrong is the fact that Karina Robinson has been openly campaigning to become Candlewick alderman prior to there being any official announcement of the election on the City of London council website. Knowing in advance of the rest of us exactly when elections are coming up gives insiders and establishment figures yet more anti-democratic advantages.

The City of London has an entirely different system of local government to the rest of the UK; and one that is completely undemocratic. This is unfair to the residents of the borough and requires immediate rectification. The decision of the Corporation’s Planning Committee to approve the demolition of the architecturally significant Bernard Morgan House, and to allow Taylor Wimpey to build an over-scaled luxury apartment block on the site is indicative of all that’s wrong with this council. We have addressed potential conflict of interest issues and the vote rigging implications of this decision elsewhere. What we wish to underline here is that neither the Planning Committee nor the council has a mandate from local people and therefore their decisions are illegitimate. The City of London is the only place in the UK to retain the business vote, and there are roughly twice as many of these as residential votes. The ward boundaries and Alderman system also favour big business over people.